Arms and the Man

Published: August 17, 2003

(Page 8 of 9)

Before the Soviet Union's collapse, Tiraspol was home to the Soviet 14th Army, which left behind 40,000 tons of weaponry, the largest arsenal in Europe. Russia had only begun to repatriate that weaponry by the time Trans-Dniester grabbed its quasi-independence. The lightly armed Trans-Dniestrians -- and the various criminals who controlled the territory -- refused to let the Russians leave with the remains. Or so Moscow says. Others disagree. ''The Russians could pull out tomorrow,'' said Mark Galeotti, an adviser to British intelligence on Russian organized crime. ''Smirnov is a puppet in the hand of Russian intelligence,'' said Ion Stavila, Moldova's deputy minister of foreign affairs.

At last count, stored in a complex of bunkers and berms and guarded by a skeleton crew of Russians are enough explosives to make two and a half Hiroshima bombs, tens of thousands of Kalashnikov assault rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition and huge numbers of antitank missiles, grenades and Scudlike rockets. Trans-Dniestrian factories may still produce weapons.

But Trans-Dniester is more than just the Wal-Mart of arms trafficking. Experts are concerned that terrorists -- or ambitious middlemen -- could find more sophisticated and dangerous things to buy. The Soviet military couldn't guarantee that all of the nuclear weapons had been removed. And hundreds of canisters of cesium-137, used by Soviet scientists to test the effects of nuclear war on plants, are unaccounted for. According to Russian documents I obtained, one 14th Army officer warned the Moldovans that in 1992 24 Alazan rockets in Trans-Dniester had been tipped with radioactive warheads. An adviser to British intelligence confirmed that some of the cesium is still inside Trans-Dniester.

In Moscow, over a drink, I asked Bout if he had been to Trans-Dniester. He shook his head no and shuddered. But British agents, who have tracked weapons from Trans-Dniester to the Balkans and beyond, have documented Bout's involvement there for years. ''It's clear that Ukrainian weapons Bout trafficked came through Trans-Dniester,'' Galeotti said. Not just things that have disappeared out of arsenals. Sophisticated surface-to-air missile systems to the Middle East. Vehicle-mounted and artillery systems. ''Large, high-tech kits. Flatbeds' and trainloads' worth. Bout's fingerprints are all over them.''

On the evening of my third day with Bout, the phone in my hotel room rang. A voice said, ''I understand we have things to talk about.'' At first I was taken aback, even amused, by the melodrama. But the voice was coldly sobering. ''Tomorrow, 1700 hours,'' the caller said. ''Go to the McDonald's on Pushkin Square. Buy two cups of coffee and sit at a table. I'll find you.'' Then he hung up.

At 5 p.m. I went to the McDonald's. It was vast, multitiered and crowded with Russian teenagers. Techno-pop was playing loudly. It was the perfect place for a private conversation.

I put two coffees on a random table and waited. At 5:02, I looked left and right into the crowd, then turned back. A man in his early 40's was in the seat across from me. ''Thank you for the coffee,'' he said.

The man didn't identify himself, but his knowledge of arms trafficking and its various players was expert. He told me that Bout was merely the public face of something much larger and that I was just getting through the surface and that to go further was very dangerous.

He alluded to two assassinations that had taken place 10 days before. Both victims were executives of a huge air-defense contractor involved in export of antiaircraft weapons and other systems.

He said to imagine the structure of arms trafficking in Russia like a mushroom. Bout was among those in the mushroom's cap, which we can see. The stalk is made up of the men who are really running things in Russia and making decisions. Looking from above, he said, you never see the stalk.

Earlier, in Kiev, Grigory Omelchenko, the former chief of Ukrainian counterintelligence, had said that traffickers like Bout are either protected or killed. ''There's total state control.''

Said E.J. Hogendoorn, the former U.N. arms investigator: ''There was the sense that there were bigger and murkier forces involved in this. Bout's being protected by highly influential people.''

I began to understand why Bout was both eager to talk and reluctant. Cornered by multiple governments, selling off his assets and hounded by the press, he wanted to complain that he had merely become the fall guy for a criminalized -- and quasi-legal -- political structure much larger and more significant than Victor Bout. But if he revealed too much, he said, he would be perilous.

Between the summers of 2000 and 2001, Western intelligence agencies targeted Bout with listening devices. Agents eavesdropped on his phone conversations. The stakes were raised even further in early 2001, when the N.S.C. was shown materials that led it to believe Bout had sold planes to Ariana Afghan Airlines, the national flagship airline that had been taken over by the Taliban. U.S. intelligence was reporting daily Ariana flights from the Emirates to the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, and U.S. officials said that these aircraft may have been delivering weapons, gold and jihadis. Though there was no evidence connecting Bout to actual weapons sales to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, the U.S. government became convinced that Bout was at least servicing the planes -- enough to make him an Al Qaeda accomplice. ''What we saw led us to think that Bout had something to do with terrorism,'' Lee Wolosky told me. ''It was handled by the part of the White House associated with terrorism. There were enough indicators that set off alarm bells. The U.S. government decided to act on that basis.''